Tribulations of February

Sigh.  February has been a rough month.  Have we ridden countless miles in blustery weather? Nope.  Have we been climbing up in the Spessart Mountains or the Odenwald to take winter landscape shots at sunrise? No.  Have we been traveling like mad? Nein.

In fact, I have spent the majority of February sitting at home doing absolutely nothing.  That thing I did to my hand several weeks ago ended up becoming a really inconvenient, life stalling problem.  This is what happened.  It's cold out, right? When it gets cold, I dry out (like a lot of people).  Well, for some reason I developed a particularly dry patch of skin in between the index and middle finger of my right hand, maybe from doing a lot of cooking or being out in the wet, cold weather.  I dunno.  I didn't think too much about it, applied some moisturizer and thought that was that.  Then I woke myself up one night scratching at this spot.  So, I picked up some Cortisone cream at the pharmacy, lathered it on and we went on to Heidelberg to take those shots I put up a couple weeks ago.  By the time we came home it was clear that the Cortisone cream and I didn't get along.  I won't go into the graphic details, but let's just say I kinda felt like a leper.  It was a rather nasty case of contact dermatitis.  It was painful and it itched like crazy.  I couldn't get my hand wet, I couldn't expose it to the cold, and I couldn't move my fingers without aggravating it further.  So, I couldn't use a camera, ride my bike (not even on a trainer), go outside, type, use a pen, cut my food, zip my coat, carry anything, etc.  Taking a shower was a complicated feat of acrobatics.  At first I didn't think it would be that big of a deal, but dermatitis takes a really long time to heal and this went on for weeks and weeks and weeks.  I've never had something like this happen before.  Even my worst bike wreck injuries (which, thankfully, haven't been too serious) have healed faster than this.  The only thing that you can do is keep it moisturized and covered, take antihistamines, and wait.  And wait.  So, I dug out (with my left hand) a spare box of cotton gloves I bought back in the day when I worked with old documents and have been sporting one a la Michael Jackson for the majority of the month. So embarrassing.  Now, being an introvert, having to spend a long period of time shut up in the house isn't a complete death sentence.  But, even I have my limits.  Not being able to do anything easily made it especially frustrating.  When I became completely unhinged last weekend over a problem with GoDaddy, I knew I was in trouble.  Mercifully, it has finally healed up to the point I can use my hand again.  I still have to wear the glove for a little bit longer to prevent a relapse, but I think I'm finally on the other side.  Sheesh.

Kids, the moral of the story is, TAKE CARE OF YOUR SKIN!

One the bright side, if something like that has to happen at least it happened when we didn't have any significant plans.  I had hoped to spend the month doing landscapes and cityscapes, but it's no huge tragedy that I couldn't.  Those places will still be there.   Also, it gave me a lot of time to read, and so I decided to revisit the works of J.R.R Tolkien.  Immersing myself back in my favorite mythical world has been really nice and may have kept me from going completely mental.  It has been quite a while since I've read all the books.  Of course, that led to re-watching all of the films...I guess there are worst ways to spend a convalescence.

While I still can't go outside, I can use a camera again.
Good chance to experiment with still lifes.

Right.  One more weekend to go then back at it.  Good thing too, we's getting rather flabby, Precious.

The Quest of the Unholy Mountain

I think I wrote not too long ago that Winter is a great time to shoot low light landscapes and such because the sun rises late and sets early.  Well, that's all well and good if the weather is agreeable.

Somehow I don't think the specs are necessary here.

Believe it or not you're looking at a big arena that can seat several thousand people.  Last Sunday we headed to Heidelberg, not to see the world's largest wine barrel, visit the castle ruins, or walk through the shopping district.  We intended to climb the "Holy Mountain" (Heilingenberg) and photograph some rather curious sights.  Instead, we climbed Heilingenberg, into a snowy fog, got lost a couple times (once again due to a lack of proper signage) and saw just a shadow of what we intended to see.  The first place was the above arena.  Truth be told, I was hoping there'd be snow or fog, but this was a little more than I was thinking.  This arena has a sinister past, and some gloomy atmospherics would fit it nicely.  It was built in 1935.  That date is probably a clue to who had it built.

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda, came up with the idea of building 1,000 of these arenas for the purpose of holding Nazi propaganda plays, presentations, and films.  These arenas were called Thingstatte or Thingplatz, in a typical Nazi attempt to tie into a fanciful Germanic past.  "Things" were actually Medieval Norse (Scandinavian) and Germanic gatherings of free men held to settle clan issues and make group decisions.  They are a very rudimentary basis for today's parliaments.  As usual, the Nazis perverted German culture heritage, in this case twisting a gathering of free people with equal voices into a tool for cultural brainwashing.  The movement wasn't a priority for Hitler, so the Thingstatte above Heidelberg turned out to be one of only 45 that were actually constructed.  This one housed 20,000 participants on its opening day, when Goebbels himself oversaw the ceremony.  After the war, the arena was abandoned for the most part.  Today it is sometimes used for concerts and open air movies.  But, mostly it sits as an empty and moss draped curiosity.  It is a popular spot to explore on Sundays, even if it is covered in ice and shrouded in a thick fog.

Fujifilm X-E2 ISO 1600 30mm f/4 1/250  

Fujifilm X-E2 ISO 1600 18mm f/11 1/60

The other site I was hoping to photograph were the ruins of the church of the Michaelkloster, a 11th century monastery.  The church incorporates the ruins of a Roman temple to Mercury.  The mountain is covered in archaeological sites; this is one of most important.  But...

iPhone 5s

Well, we climbed the Holy Mountain as fast as possible despite the lack of signs in the super thick mist and finally arrived at St. Michael's Cloister to find an actual useful sign which conveyed a great deal of information (don't sell things here, don't set things on fire, don't come in when the gate is shut, respect the premises, the authorities will track you down if you do any of this stuff...).  However, what it did not say was that it won't be open even when the sign says it should be.  While tourists can haul themselves up here through snow, ice, and fog, the person responsible for making sure people don't sell stuff or light stuff on fire couldn't be bothered.

Thankfully, the hut at the top of the mountain was open so we could grab a drink and thaw out.  That was that.  No pictures of ruins, just pictures of mist over a barely recognizable, uh, thing.  Ok, Winter, you're tough.

We did grab this shot of the Alte Brucke on our way to dinner.

Fujifilm X-E2 ISO 200 46mm f/10 15secs, soft focus filter

 Somehow over the course of all this I managed to tweak the index and middle finger of my right hand.  Being a righty, this causes me a bit of a problem in just about everything, but most definitely for holding or operating a camera.  So, I'm out of commission until things heal up.  Perhaps I'll do a little indoor work this week.  Perhaps.